Nutrition

May 7, 2019 — The waters off New England teem with a wide range of species, from scup, white hake, and mackerel to whelk, surf clams, and peekytoe crab. But despite this abundance, just a small handful of regionally available species dominate the marketplace—mostly lobster, scallops, and cod. Why don’t supermarket shelves better mirror the diversity of local waters?

That question is the subject of a new survey of fish and shellfish diversity in grocery stores and specialty markets in New England. The study, published on Monday by Eating with the Ecosystem, a nonprofit that promotes local and sustainable seafood harvesting in the Northeast, looks for “symmetry”: namely, the balance between the creatures found in nearby waters and the products found in the seafood section. For now, the study found, that proportion is greatly out of whack.

The report is based on the shopping experiences of 86 citizen scientists, who collected data over a six-month period of time. Each week, participants were randomly assigned four species from a list of 52 species commonly found in the waterways where New England fishers harvest their catch. They were instructed to seek their targets out at up to three markets, bring one home, cook out, and rate their experience. Basically, it was adult hide-and-seek but with pollock and sea urchins instead of people.

May 6, 2019 — A small African fish called the tilapia may be vital for meeting the future food needs of humanity, according to scientists, but they are also concerned that a killer disease discovered in recent years could wipe out the species. That, they warn, would have devastating social and economic consequences for China and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.

Although its name may not be widely known, the freshwater tilapia is second only to carp as the world’s most widely farmed fish, and China is the largest producer. With global production of farmed tilapia reaching 6.3 million tonnes in 2018 and an estimated market value of US$9.8 billion, the little fish is big business. That’s because it is an essential source of protein, revenue and employment in the developing world.

An advantage of farming tilapia was once its resistance to disease, which is a constant problem in intensive fish farming. But a new virus has caught the industry off guard. Tilapia lake virus, or Tilapia tilapinevirus, was identified in 2014.

Scientists know little more about it, except that it has a morbidity rate of up to 90 per cent, depending on the strain, and is highly contagious. The first indication of the virus on a fish farm is lots of dead tilapia.

May 6, 2019 — High-tech meat alternatives are grabbing a lot of headlines these days. Last month, the Impossible Burger marked a meatless milestone with its debut as a Burger King Whopper. Meanwhile, Lou Cooperhouse was in a San Diego office park quietly forging plans to disrupt another more fragmented and opaque sector of the food industry: seafood.

His company, BlueNalu (a play on a Hawaiian term that means both ocean waves and mindfulness), is racing to bring to market what’s known as cell-based seafood — that is, seafood grown from cells in a lab, not harvested from the oceans.

BlueNalu is aiming for serious scalability — a future where cities around the globe will be home to 150,000-square-foot facilities, each able to produce enough cell-based seafood to meet the consumption demands of more than 10 million nearby residents.

But unlike Impossible Foods, BlueNalu is not creating a plant-based seafood alternative like vegan Toona or shrimpless shrimp. Instead, Cooperhouse and his team are extracting a needle biopsy’s worth of muscle cells from a single fish, such as a Patagonian toothfish, orange roughy and mahi-mahi.

Lund’s Fisheries is pleased to announce that the U.S. Northeast Northern Shortfin Squid (illex) fishery has been certified as sustainable against the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) fisheries standard. Lund’s now offers the only two species of squid in the world to have obtained MSC certification: the company’s loligo squid fishery was certified as sustainable last year.

“Lund’s is at the forefront of providing consumers with fresh, sustainably harvested seafood,” said Wayne Reichle, President of Lund’s Fisheries. “MSC certification for illex squid is just the latest example of our commitment to ensuring that all of our products are responsibly harvested and sustainably sourced.”

With an MSC label, consumers can be sure that their seafood comes from a fishery that is managed effectively and sustainably, and from one that minimizes its environmental impact. MSC certification is widely considered one of the strictest certification labels in the world, the “gold standard” of sustainable seafood. Through its active pursuit of the MSC label for its squid and Atlantic sea scallop products, and its sustainable sourcing of the rest of its product line, Lund’s is a leader in bringing environmentally friendly products to the U.S. and European markets.

“Consumers can be confident that when they purchase squid, scallops, or any other seafood from Lund’s, it comes with a commitment to support the long-term health of our oceans and marine life,” Mr. Reichle said.

Illex squid are migratory and occupy a large range, from Newfoundland to Florida. Unlike many other species of fish, illex squid likely to not be significantly affected by climate change, and some studies indicate that the species may even benefit from warmer ocean temperatures. Fisheries managers are confident enough in the future health of the species that they are proposing to raise the quota this year from 22,915 mt to 24,825 mt, an 8 percent increase.

Lund’s will be showcasing its sustainable squid products at this year’s Seafood Expo Global, taking place in Brussels, Belgium from May 7-9. Stop by booth 6-1225 to meet with our U.S. and European sales staff, who are dedicated to providing sustainable squid and scallop options for you and your customers.

April 30, 2019 — A joint campaign in France run by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), has just landed the two organizations a Grand Prix Award for Social Responsibility. It was presented during a ceremony in Paris at PRODURABLE, the fair for Sustainable Development and Corporate Social Responsibly.

The prize was awarded for “Semaine de la Peche Responsible” (Sustainable Seafood Week), which was first run in February 2017 and has since become an annual event.

The week of activities highlighted issues including overfishing, illegal fishing, and the importance of safeguarding marine biodiversity and habitats, and fish stocks for future generations. The event has been growing quickly in both size and public profile in recent years.

In competition with 48 other brands, the ASC and MSC were joint winners of the best NGO label category, in recognition of their collaborative efforts with partners, brands, aquariums, institutions and distributors, to mobilize public support for sustainable fisheries and responsible fish farming.

The award was shared with French retailer Carrefour, which won for its support of programs to find permanent living solutions for the homeless.

April 26, 2019 — When I sat down at a Portland kombucha bar to attend a local Seaweed 101 session, I fully expected a love story about wild, vegan kelp and how we can change the world by eating more sea vegetables. What I didn’t expect was an in-depth exchange about federal fishery management and how it has decimated the industry’s communities in New England.

VitaminSea owner, and host of the session, Tom Roth was a commercial tilefish captain out of New Jersey a lifetime ago. He transitioned into New York Harbor tugboats as the industry declined, and started diving for kelp in his spare time from his home base in southern Maine about 15 years ago.

These days he goes out in a 40-foot boat that carries three other divers, two wooden skiffs and two Zodiacs. Each diver takes a small craft out on his own; they spread out, harvest, then meet back at the boat to help each other unload.

April 12, 2019 — Replacing fish food with plants may not be as planet-friendly as it seems, according to a new study on the ecological impact of feeding soy and other land-grown crops to farmed seafood. These plant-based feeds are an alternative to, well, other sea creatures, which is what many species like shrimp and salmon eat in the wild. Published in the science journal Sustainability, the new study—which involved which involved an international and multidisciplinary team of experts—quantifies the effects that plant-based feeds have on land, water, and fertilizer use. The numbers that emerge challenge the prevailing notion that simply swapping fish-based fish food for plant-based fare can minimize the environmental footprint of aquaculture.

The interlocking limitations of fish-based feed, also known as fishmeal, have long confounded the aquaculture industry. For one, its ingredients—small, wild fish lower in the food chain, known as forage fish—are a finite resource. And as the global appetite for seafood continues to rise, so does the pressure to catch more. That means that fishmeal is becoming more costly and harder to source. As a result, producers have been trying to reduce their reliance in recent years.

“When shrimp farming became very popular 30 to 35 years ago, there was kind of a preference to grow as many shrimp as you can, as fast as you can, and get them out on the market,” says Cheryl Shew, a representative of specialty feed manufacturer Ziegler Bros. Inc. But like much of the industry, Ziegler began to experiment with soy as a partial substitute fishmeal in its feed products beginning in the early aughts, Shew tells me.

So why not just completely replace fishmeal with plants? It’s not as easy as it sounds—or as environmentally-sound, as it turns out.

April 8, 2019 — There is a growing appetite among younger consumers, particularly millennials, for food and seafood that has an authentic story to tell, according to the Norwegian Seafood Council (NSC), which has been working directly with American consumers in recent years – through various focus groups – to understand what drives and deters modern seafood purchasing.

With the primary aim of helping Norwegian fisheries and the country’s aquaculture industry to develop new markets, NSC has been keeping a pulse on the consumption trends dominating in the United States, and has found that when it comes to seafood and other proteins, a good origin story can go a long way.

“Origin matters for the end-consumers,” Egil Ove Sundheim, the U.S. director of NSC, explained to SeafoodSource.

This seems especially so for millennials, the generation responsible for overhauling the ways in which food and mealtimes are experienced, and the demographic set to acquire the majority of purchasing power within the next decade, Sundheim said.

“In five, seven, 10 years, [millennials] will be the most important purchasers of food, as they start to build families,” he said.

April 1, 2019 — It’s long been known that air pollution influences the risk — and severity — of asthma. Now, there’s emerging evidence that diet can play a role, too.

A new study finds that higher consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, found in oily fish such as salmon, sardines and lake trout, and in some plant sources such as walnuts and flaxseed, is linked to reduced asthma symptoms in city kids who are exposed to fairly high levels of indoor air pollution.

“We know that asthma is a disease that’s driven by inflammation,” explains Dr. Emily Brigham, a pulmonologist at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the study. As our bodies digest fish, the omega-3 fatty acids generate byproduct molecules known as “pro-resolving mediators” that make their way into our lungs. “They help to resolve inflammation,” Brigham says.

Given this anti-inflammatory effect, Brigham and her colleagues had a hunch that diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids may help attenuate the effects of air pollution on kids’ symptoms. To study this, they tracked the diets and indoor air pollution levels (from sources including smoke, dust and allergens) in the homes of 135 children, mostly African-American and all with asthma, in Baltimore, Md.

They measured two types of indoor air pollution, made up of different sizes of particulate matter: PM2.5 (fine inhalable particles that are 2.5 micrometers or smaller), and the somewhat larger PM10. These particulates are all too small for us to see, but they can make their way into our airways, and the smaller size — PM2.5 — can lodge deeply inside our lungs.

March 26, 2019 — A new Marine Stewardship Council study has found mislabeling of its certified seafood is lower than the average of several other recent studies, which claim to have detected seafood mislabeling rates as high as 30 percent.

MSC’s expansive analysis of 1,402 MSC-certified fish products from 18 countries found that fewer than 1 percent of MSC-labeled seafood products were mislabeled.

“There is widespread concern over the vulnerability of seafood supply chains to deliberate species mislabelling and fraud. In the past, this has included some of the most loved species such as cod being substituted by farmed catfish, which can seriously undermine consumer trust and efforts to maintain sustainable fisheries,” the lead of author of the paper, the MSC’s Jaco Barendse, said in an MSC press release.

The MSC’s ecolabeling and Chain of Custody program is an effective deterrent for systematic and deliberate species substitution and fraud, the organization said.

In the new study, the largest and most comprehensive assessment of MSC-labeled products, MSC worked with laboratories of the TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network and SASA’s (Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture) Wildlife DNA Forensic unit to employ DNA barcoding.

Of the 1,402 seafood products tested, 1,389 were labeled correctly and 13 (0.92 percent) were not. Mislabeled products were found in fresh and frozen pre-packed products and in restaurants, mainly in Western Europe, with one case in the U.S. All cases of mislabeling were identified in whitefish (such as cod, hake, and hoki) and flatfish products.